Sunday Meditation #48: We Are Imperial and Ridiculous

The night sky bears down on us with its scattering of diamonds on black velvet. The pale smear of the Milky Way slips in and out of vision, frustrating and captivating all at once. In the fleeting moments where the Via Lactea can be seen it is brought home with dizzying impact that everything in the Universe is either You or Not-You. Such thoughts either evoke laughter or consternation.

You or Not-You. The imperial absurdity of it comes clear if "potato" is substituted for You. Everything in the Universe is either a potato or not a potato. An internet meme thus becomes the cornerstone of a new philosophy of self-awareness. It can be safely said by us all that "I am not a potato, therefore I am!" 

Silliness, indeed. Such thoughts on an icy winter night turn life into an extended Monty Python skit, a theater of the absurd in which we all star. "I am not a potato," we mutter into the cold air whilst shaking our relatively tiny fists at the sky. It all becomes meta. A conflation of the Universe in its immensity with tubers and all the things we are not but which we consume. We may not be potatoes or air or books, but these things become part of us the instant we chew, breathe, or read. Sometimes all those at once.

To stand under the stars and revel in the mundanity of a humble tuber as being you and not-you is profound and absurd. The paradoxes within can make the head spin and the mind marvel at the amount of energy we expend on the maintenance of partitions between ourselves and our circumstances. By such fiction we strive to convince ourselves we can be masters of the universe. 

To see the stars above and the ground below is to know, however, that we are not potatoes. We are not the Universe. We eat the one and curse and praise the other. This assures us that we are human, even if potatoes and galaxies do not seem to know we exist. We consume them both, and are consumed by the imperial and the ridiculous.

Super Heavy

Hurtling down the highway on my morning rounds and I see another one up ahead. The shape is familiar, a small yellow triangle emblazoned on the corrugated side of a shipping container. The words are well-known to me now. "SUPER HEAVY", it says, right there on the side of what the warning label declares to be a high-cube model. About 8,600 pounds of weathering steel clamped to the back of a semi and loaded with who knows what. This day, clouds and all, I feel it. Super heavy.

This sort of thing makes you think while spending so much time on the roads in the middle of the country. Shipping containers are all over the place out here, on trains and trucks. Danish, German, Korean, Chinese concerns pushing their charges overseas and through the woods and to Grandma's house we go. Curiosity got the better of me, because I had to know how the super heavy vibes got here, and landed on my head and filling my heart with ghosts.

Container ships. It is how it gets done. Insanely large vessels carrying thousands of twenty- and forty-foot long steel boxes full of stuff. Boxes that get loaded, offloaded, put on trucks and trains and sent forth into the world to scatter their contents hither and yon. Things that you didn't know you needed, perhaps, or things you didn't want but found you anyway. It hit me this morning that this is my grief, too. A load of super heavy, coming from a strange place far away.

Amongst my vehicular ruminations in the soggy heat of a tenacious summer I could not also help but wonder just what it is that powers these huge ships that bring us stuff from all points on earth. A little research turned up that most of these vessels burn something called "bunker fuel", which turns out to be sort of the lowest of the low amongst refined petroleum products. It is thick, black-brown sludge leftover after all the other easier to use and more valuable fractions have been extracted from the crude. 

Bunker fuel is so thick you can walk on on it when it is cold. Cheap and easy to get, it burns like the outer rim of hell and creates a lot of pollution generating all sorts of nasty things when it goes up in flames. But it is what drives the fleet. It makes it possible to move tonnage, even if we don't want or need the weight.

Another day, another road trip, and when I spied another yellow triangle the pieces of all this began falling into place. I know why the clouds seem so low, the air too hot, the weight too much to carry. All that semi-useless knowledge and the thick, black well of my grief congealing into a metaphor so bitter I had to laugh as I wiped my eyes.

I've seen this ship before, this behemoth of sadness and grief barreling out of the mist to run me over. Not once, not twice, but three times has the darkness punched me in the heart. A person can't watch three babies dies in his life and feel like he is a typical passenger on the cruise we hope to call life. No one can.

But I know what this is. Having sailed my ship right into a storm only to be fished out of the sea and carried away by a hulking black steel mass known as the MV Grief, I am a container lashed to the deck. The engines thrum and moan, burning the bunker fuel of sadness at a rate that threatens to drain the core of the world. The joke is on us, that this ship burns the same stuff packed into the container that I am. A person-shaped container full of the black-brown sticky spew of hell that wrapped itself around my heart faster than I could scrape it off.

I had to laugh, I said. The images burning in my head were too terrible for any other reaction. I have a secret that the captain of the Grief does not know: I can carry more than his ship can ever dream of. There is no vessel that can carry what I have had to carry. I have proof. I am alive. I burn the bunker fuel in my heart and know that memories of the children and grandchild that I held are cargo that far outweighs the grief of their loss. I am super heavy, but I am not lost at sea.

Electric Potsherds, or Fragments of a Mind

This is a story about a...no. No, it isn't. A story has characters and a plot. What do these fragments represent? Characters, surely. But plot? Perhaps about as much plot as plastic shopping bags swirling around in a dust devil. This is what happens when ideas come without focus. 

DIFFRACTIVE ATTENTION
It is a wonder to me how the human race, and in specific the human that is me, manages to survive these days. I have written of this before, many moons ago. Existing in a flurry of information, data, numbers, feeds, stats. How do we keep our eyes on the road when the road is overlaid with avatars and sigils that have no bearing on the task at hand? I ask myself this on a daily basis and give thanks that I have driven many miles without hitting anything or anyone.

FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT A REALLY DEEP HOLE
Kola Superdeep: no, it is not some weird Japanese soft drink. It is a borehole completed by Russian scientists after beginning drilling in 1970, ultimately reaching a depth below the surface of the Earth of 40,230 feet. That is a deep hole, folks. It is called Kola because the Soviets established the drill head on the Kola Peninsula. Some facts:

Latitude and longitude coordinates:  69°23′46.39″N 30°36′31.20″E
Years drilled: 1971 to 1989
Year abandoned: 2006
Depth reached: 40,230 feet (12,262 meters)
Temperature at bottom: 356 °F
Why they did it: Because why not?

FLASH FICTION FOR YOU!
He was imprisoned for the crime of being normal, without formal charges or a lawyer. A rented mule. They beat him like a rented mule. He bore the stripes on his back for decades until one day the scars turned him inside out. It was then that he saw there had been a hole in the bars the entire time of his incarceration. His blood is on the steel to this day.

DAY 18,263 - THEY SUSPECT EVERYTHING
The experiment is not going as hoped. En masse the Others are expressing doubts about Subject's humanity. Trending data suggests that the mask is faulty, or that the laboratory-applied veneer of civilization is sloughing off. If such deterioration does not reverse itself, our attempts at integration will be exposed. This represents a potential setback of years. 

An emergency meeting of the Human Reorganization Committee has been called. We cannot risk the loss of decades of painstaking work.

WE ALL COME FROM DIVORCE
"We all come from divorce!" he says. "This is an age of divorce. Things that belong together have been taken apart. And you can't put it ALL back together again. What you can do, is the only thing you can do. You take two things that ought to be together and you put them together. Two things! Not ALL things."

-Wendell Berry, in The Seer

LOVE IS THE HAMMER POUNDING OUR ANVIL HEARTS
I saw a murmuration of starlings against the sunrise on the morning I sent her home. They fluttered and swirled, living pennant in the hands of a master gymnast. It is not often that the universe stirs the spiritual in the cold stone of my heart, but that morning was different. My regret, beyond the usual, was that it was a machine to which I entrusted the star of my soul and not those starlings. I have no doubt the birds would have cared well for her. The machine I grudgingly trust, a melancholy but necessary trust.

EXUBERANCE!
Wonderful they were, those plump sparrows frolicking in the fountain below the balcony of the inn. How alive they must have been to leap headlong into chilly water on such a crisp fall morning! A New Mexican cerulean sky and argentine light on the Sangre De Cristo implored us to do the same. Briefly a sparrow fluttered in my heart, warmed by sips of tea.

STATISTICALLY SPEAKING, THE UNITED STATES IS EXTREMELY LUCKY
According to a number of sources, there are an estimated 110 million anti-personnel land mines left in the ground around the world. 110 million. That is roughly one mine for every 52 people on Earth. In more colorful parlance, that is a shit-ton of land mines.

It is a safe bet that none of those mines is hidden in American soil.  Think about that the next time you go digging in your yard to plant some flowers or vegetables. Sustenance without fear of getting your legs blown off.

THAT WHICH I HOPE IS TRUE: STARDUST AND ROSE PETALS
Little breathy gulps as the child feeds in your arms. The scent is in the sweat, the taste of it is dark and burnt sweet in the back of your throat. Do not bother coughing, convulsive spasms will not clear it. Not that it should. The one true remedy is to drink deep of this bright matter. Swallow that, earthlings, it is the proof of life. Gazing deep into those eyes of indigo and coal it will be inescapable from you that the child and yourself are made of stardust and rose petals.

Sunday Meditation #45: Eating the Home of Boyhood

Truth as revealed in a sandwich, found in a place unexpected. Roadside sub shop franchised, branded, and with all the chips from your boyhood. Stickball special they call it but you know it as the sandwich that meant you were home.

Home. Cheese, ham and capocollo with the usual suspects. And funny how it warms you up, maybe even brings a slight tear to the eye, because of that feeling of home. Nostalgia wasn't on the menu, not a condiment, not a cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookie next to the register. No, it was none of those things, and everything.

To find the past you left behind, the days of idle wonder in the summer and stultifying boredom (sometimes) in the school year, the laying on your back in the grass while falling asleep to the drone of airplanes...to find these things and more in between the bites of lettuce and onion, tomato and hot pepper relish, is a minor miracle.

Watching the wine vinegar and the olive oil drip off the bun, running down the heel of your hand you can give thanks that you aren't truly weeping in the fluorescent glare of the sandwich shop. Seeing yourself in the window glass under that dead-making light is a bit of a shock. So much older now. Unknown if you are much wiser.

What you do know as you wash down the last bite of the sandwich with gulps of unsweetened tea is that you were a young lad once. A young lad who only needed a favorite sandwich and a book to know he was home. He is there, you see. In the glass looking back at you and wondering who that fellow is, so near and so far from home.

Sunday Meditation #44: Interstitial Crisis

I have spent my life making much of the in between. The places no one thinks about, the leftover, the marginal, the edges of the edges. 

I am the interstitial. I am the space between. I am the floor between floors holding things rarely in mind unless they break. The floors that matter only if the power fails or the air conditioning gives up. This is my life, my head space to carry the pipes and the ducts that allow others to do the talking. It is my bed and I must lie in it.

Floor 13-1/2. Duck your head when stepping off the elevator. A condition of existence when one chooses to live in the margins of the book. Is this a cry for pity? No. No pity needed. This path is voluntary, if somewhat regrettable.

The battle cry these days seems to be "No regrets!", but in my mind I think that is just rationalization of emotional laziness, an unwillingness to acknowledge that what we have done may have hurt others. To swallow the pill of No Regrets is to announce to the world that we have not been paying attention to our lives, to living. To live honestly is to experience regret.

A digression, if I may be indulged. To my ears most of those people whom I have heard say "No regrets!", or have it tattooed somewhere on their person, seem to be overbearing types who have made a lot of willful mistakes. Their hoisting of the banner of No Regret is an attempt to disown responsibility, to avoid a reckoning of the emotional damage they may have wrought.

If I were to campaign my life on the platforms of no regrets, it would be from the perspective of not having done or said something regretful in the first place. My life would be lived in such a way as to do the things I want to do the way I want to do them, without hurting others in the process. An ideal, I know. One that is impossible to attain.

Ah, I see this has gone off the rails a bit, has it not? Somehow I drifted from a meditation on living in the in-between to a screed about pretending to live without regrets. How does this happen? A side effect, perhaps, of living life in the interstices, where one thinks too much and maybe really lives not enough. This is what I get for insisting on living at the edges, for making my home in the spaces in between.

A Thousand Channels, 24/7

On bright mornings, the traveler was caught off-guard by ghosts. Memories of the past washing ashore on the beach of his mind. It was the driving, really, that did it. The road stretched out before him full of promise. He would smile and choke down a few tears. The piquancy of his brother's ghost, the never-heard cries of his first born children, all gone except for that irreducible block of memory. Searing pain and ecstasy make a curious couple intertwined in the mind and heart. It was the road. The one that started a thousand miles away and led him into a sea of grass and remembrance.

"Did you see that?" (laughter)

"See what?" (Momentary befuddlement)

"That sign back there."

"Just now? No. What did it say?"

"Get this: MICHAELANGELO'S LIQUORS."

"Say whaaat?" (Giggling fit)

" I know, man! Who knew that he liked to get his drink on here?" (More laughter)

"Seriously, man, look how far he fell from the Sistine Chapel."

(Pensive silence)

Once more on the road, I have to do it, it's part of the job. I'm used to it now. Except for the run-down parts of town. Or towns, I should clarify. No, towns and cities. There is a lot of them out here and there are quite a few where it seems like the inhabitants have been ground down by life. Or the landlords were ground down. Or maybe everyone just stopped caring. Too many buildings possessed of gray dinginess, decrepitude and crappy signage. There is still cause for amusement, though. Passing through one such area, driving past Legs Party Bar ("Open 'til 2 AM!") I saw that the Knobtown Strip Center has added a new tenant. It's a "spa" offering"massage". I had to laugh. What, "Cheap Smokes and Liquor" from the joint next door aren't good enough?

A RECORD OF COMESTIBLES PURCHASED FOR THE MIDDAY REPAST

Dine In  9/23/2015  12:33:28 PM

Order # 132156  Cashier: Destiny M.

1 LG Steamer $8.49

 Mayo NO

1 Reg Combo  $2.59

 Medium Drink*

 Chip For Combo

Sub. Total:    $11.08

Tax:                 $1.04

Total:             $12.12

   Visa:            $12.12

   Change:       $0.00

The Kansas City Royals baseball team won their division this year. They will have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Their first opponent is the scrappy Houston Astros, who made the playoffs for the first time since 2005. The inhabitants are looking forward to a great series, hopefully the Boys in Blue will get to go to the World Series again like they did last year. Everyone is talking about them and tuning in. One thing is for certain: the Royals seem easy to like, even if one is a fan of another team.

No matter how many times I have seen it in the course of my job, I still find it annoying that most people seem to think that tissue boxes with shiny colors or "art" on them are true interior decoration. They aren't, and never will be. The amount of time I waste in the course of a typical day hiding those boxes, so I can shoot a better picture, may not be huge on an individual basis, but it adds up. Every time I move one I think of French author Honoré de Balzac, who after a night of sex, allegedly lamented "There goes another novel!"

Did You Know? Collared lizards can run on their hind legs with a stride that reaches more than 3 times the length of their bodies.

Excerpt from the National Park Service's Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve webpage:

     Tallgrass prairie once covered 170 million acres of North America. Within a generation
     the vast majority was developed and plowed under. Today less than 4% remains, mostly
     here in the Kansas Flint Hills. The preserve protects a nationally significant remnant of           

     the once vast tallgrass prairie and its cultural resources. Here the tallgrass prairie takes     

     its last stand.

A Typical Day of Carnage -

 Raccoons: 5

 Opossums: 1

 Birds (species unknown): 3

 Squirrels: 8?

 Deer: 1

 Mouse: 1

It was the mouse that really threw me. To date I had never seen one in all my rounds. I nearly trampled it on my way back to  the car.

I-70 gets it start back east, and not very auspiciously. It begins in a Park-And-Ride in Baltimore, Maryland. It runs 2,151 miles to the west, passing though St. Louis, Kansas City and Denver until it peters out in an interchange with I-15 just outside Cove Fort, Utah. The distance from Cove Fort to Kansas City is 1,106 miles. The distance from Kansas City to Baltimore is 1,060 miles. It is a new life in the center.

I am home now. It was a busy day, lots of photos to be shot, lots of pavement to be traversed. I was able to drive with the windows down all day. No A/C. The rush of air through the cabin of my small SUV provides a white noise that allows me to follow my Zen. I think a lot while driving. Sometimes I talk to myself. Other times, especially on long drives away from the urban clutter, I stop and listen to the insects in the grass.

---

If anyone is perplexed by the passages above, you should know they are a tribute of sorts, my offering to a literary form previously unknown to me. The form is called biji, and it is of Chinese origin dating back to 220 AD, surviving up until about 1912 AD. I came across it in a fascinating book published by McSweeney's, titled "Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed"*. I bought the book at a book store specializing in overstocks, trade-ins and other forms of second-hand volumes. Great buy, wonderful stuff. According to McSweeny's, biji can be translated as "notebook" and is characterized by "Musings, anecdotes, quotations, 'believe-it-or-not' fiction and social anthropology". They go on further to say that biji also can contain legends, scientific notes, and bits of local wisdom. Lists of interesting objects and travel narratives are also quite common. After reading the examples in the book (and being somewhat disturbed by the 'modern' take on it by Douglas Coupland) I was immediately smitten by the form and the idea. Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time can probably see why this is so. I think it is because biji finally, after all these years, puts a name to the things in my head.

*Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed, as curated by Darren Franich and Graham Weatherly, 2009 by McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Kickboxing Was Not The Sport of My Future

I am at home now. Ostensibly at peace, sitting by an open window with the sounds of the night drifting in on soothing whispers. Home for me being the mythical cottage by the ever-restless Mare Metaphoris of my own imagining. It was but two short weeks ago that I was on the shore of the very real Atlantic Ocean, in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware with my not-quite-so-Wee-anymore Lass. A fine day trip to that seaside town, with waves curling in under a sky of hazy blue. She was laughing. My heart was growing. Then the waves broke and carried me away.

I was squatting at the high edge of surf when the mirror broke. Staring out to sea, I had dipped two fingers of my right hand in the water, brought them to my lips for a taste of home. The salt and iron tang was a hammer shattering the glass of the illusion I had maintained until then: That I am for this contemporary world, there is a place for me here. That was the nutshell: for too long I had struggled with the notion that I can fit in, make my way in a culture and society with which I feel so out of sync.

It was no surprise, in hindsight, that my ocean side revelations happened so close to my impending half-century birthday, swiftly bearing down on me in roughly two months. Truly it is a source of wonderment and incredulity that I have made it this far, considering how much time I have frittered away on trying to figure out life in lieu of truly living it. A root cause of my simmering discontentment, awakened by the taste of seawater on my tongue.

For a few moments I teetered on the brink of a soured mood, flailing and trying to avoid falling into a human-shaped chasm of discontent. The day trip would have been ruined. The gravity of it tugged at my emotions. Familiar turf, it would have been, and its own cold comfort. A flash of sunlight coruscated off the waves, temporarily blinding me. In that second or so of non-vision, the old man in the back of my head spoke.

"You didn't realize until now you're Lloyd Dobler, that guy from the movie Say Anything. You liked him a lot so many years ago, but you didn't think you were him. You know what really bothers you now? You are Lloyd Dobler, and he is turning fifty."

Then he laughed, a big wave sprinted up the shingle, and my cargo shorts were soaked for a good three inches. My daughter squealed in glee as she ran up the beach fleeing the waves. She laughed, too. I snapped out of my funk. The tang of salt air filled my lungs, and I grinned. Maybe the old man was right. Even if he was, I am Lloyd but I am me, and we will make sense of the world even if it is not quite for me.

---

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."  

---Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) in 1989's "Say Anything"

Belly Without Name

Field notes, 6:07 PM. Dinner in a Greek restaurant that shall remain nameless.

It is cold this night. A prediction of rain, sleet, freezing rain and most likely snow. I am perched on a high seat at a two-person table alongside a wall of windows looking out upon a nondescript four-way intersection. As I tuck into a gyro plate and green salad I realize how fitting it is that the root for the word 'anonymous' is Greek in origin. The word is anonumous, 'nameless'. That is the word for which my belly was searching, and with which it fills. 

I eat at this establishment on a semi-regular basis. Not because the food, which is Greek in origin and concept, is necessarily the best exemplar to be had around these parts. There are other restaurants that do certain items better, so much better that their relative lack of atmosphere (dive-ishness, even) is offset by the deliciousness of the food.  The food is good enough. On the days I eat here, it gives me what I want: comfort without identity.

It is this shade of anonymity that I discovered is part of the appeal for me. Lately when I dine here, I dine alone. Usually at the end of work day when circumstance has decreed that I will not have a companion for dinner. I make the decision as I am driving out of the parking lot at work, when hunger, fatigue and proximity act as the trade winds which blow my vessel a few blocks down the street. I set that course because it involves no mystery and few decisions.

When I walk through the storefront doors, there is no "where everybody knows your name" kind of moment. No nodding of heads, no shouted greetings, only a (usually) short line which I join and quickly scan the menu. Since I am still a relative newcomer in this area, there is no one who knows me. No one I recognize. Perhaps the counter people have a vague recollection that I have been in before. Something along the lines of "It's that bearded fellow who always orders the same thing".

I place my order, they give me my number, I sip tea while waiting. The place is quickly filling up with diners and take-away customers. I see a lot of kids and senior citizens, families, couples, one guy like me. All sitting and waiting for our number to be called.

When it is, I take my tray and grab a seat on the edge of the dining room. Always the edge. I have never liked being in the middle of rooms or crowds, from school to restaurants to concerts. The edges make it easier for me to relax and observe. Plus, lower probability of social interaction, which is something I am less than graceful at even when I am not tired and hungry.

I sit. I slowly begin to eat. The hubbub of voices surrounds me, but does not overwhelm. A stream of voices that blend into a rhythmic drone, out which pops the occasional recognizable word or even phrase. In the corners of the room, two large televisions are playing a repeating loop of travel videography from the Greek isles. In the occasional lull of conversation, you can hear snippets of bouzoukis playing. In conjunction with the lack of captions or subtitles on the video, the sounds are an odd blend amplifying the 'namelessness' of this dining experience. 

I find it oddly soothing. I feel this way almost every time I come here. This does not bother me, because it is what I want, maybe need. Neither myself nor my fellow diners have an imperative to make this place an extension of their living room or front yard or residential community. The primary imperative for all of us is our bellies, and the need to fill them.

I finish up. With nowhere to be and nothing obligating me to move, I sit quietly. Ruminating on the meal, I am at ease for at least a few minutes. The dining room hums along oblivious to my presence, and that suits me just fine. For a few precious moments my belly and I have nowhere to be, no one to satisfy, no obligations to fulfill. Myself, my belly, we are nameless. We are content.

Dinner Instead of Reality

Truth is stranger than fiction, isn't that how the saying goes? These days it seems true. A few minutes absorbing the daily news illuminates it. To write fiction these days, for myself at least, is an increasingly difficult task. Any ideas I have are trumped in an instant by the world beyond my shoulders. Ferguson, Ebola and politics have taken the starch out of the imagination.

This entry, case in point. I don't know what to say. Living with all this noise in my head slugging it out with the noise outside my head, the best that can be said is that it is a draw. The weirdness on both sides cancels out. 

I wanted to tell you about a man searching for meaning and truth at the top of a mountain range. I was going to illuminate why a middle-aged concrete finisher named Harley Mossman sat in the road crying for half an hour before the police showed up. With any luck, I might have been able to pound out a short story or a poem or a silly essay about my cat and his eating habits. But, no.

Somewhere between the car door and the desk chair, all that noise overwhelmed me. Too much fatigue and low-grade anxiety for me to process. So instead I made dinner. All I can say about that is that it was my attempt at making a Spanish style fabada, a bean stew, based only on my memory and the ingredients I happened to have on hand. To my delight, it turned out tasting quite good.

It was not, as I discovered in my post-meal reading, exactly a classic  fabada. It shared some common ingredients, but somewhat different technique. I had the paprika, the beans, blood sausage and ham shanks. Garlic, too. But I added bell peppers, celery and onion. A little thyme and oregano. I guess you could say it was a Kansas City fabada by way of New Orleans.

I suppose you could call it a distant cousin. Same name, some similar looks, but definitely different. You could also call it delicious. A full belly on a cool fall night is a blessing indeed.

Comfort Food for Plague Years

The universe has a reputation as a cruel and heartless place. Well deserved by most reasonable measures, measures highlighted by the cascade of disturbing news that washes over our daily lives. There is no escaping it, it seems. Horrifying words, images, and sounds burst forth from the screens of whatever electronic device is the weapon of choice in front of our scratched and bleeding senses.

Plague. War. Civil unrest. Even the perhaps lesser evil of data theft, private lives smeared across the ether in a toxic blur of titillation. Everything becomes pornography now, because the trend is think that having an impulse to consume grants the right to consume whatever it is the appetite wants. All because the access is supposedly granted because the victims deserved it and should not have put it "out there" in public.

The fundamental flaw with that line of consumption is that the victims (that is the correct word) do not choose to become violently ill, get murdered by rockets, or be shot for the sake of public display. No one expects their private stuff to get stolen (and data classifies as 'stuff') when they have taken reasonable precautions to keep the stuff from those who do not have permission to possess it.

No one blames the depositors for a bank heist that cleans out the safe deposit boxes. No one blames a kid who gets shredded by shrapnel because he was in the wrong place. No one with any common decency, that is.

All of this has weighed heavily on my mind in recent weeks. From the shooting of Michael Brown to the Russian tanks in Ukraine to the nasty virus eating up West Africa, the plague of bad news has been inescapable. Partly my fault, I know, because I listen to a lot of news while driving in my car.

But partly, it is due to the sheer volume of nastiness going on in the world. The funk thickened today, gelling around my psyche like smothering epoxy. Escape was necessary. The path was an unlikely one, paved as it was with two cans of tuna fish and a bag of egg noodles. Somewhere out on the road today, I did not see a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, but my back brain conspired with my belly to convince me I wanted tuna noodle casserole for dinner. It was a stroke of culinary genius.

I had not eaten homemade tuna noodle casserole in decades. The genesis of the idea burbled up in that little kitchen I fancy takes up some space in my brain. In there a slightly frazzled chef hunched over a butcher block table, scribbling ideas in a tattered ledger about what appeasements will be made to the maw that growls under his stained jacket. Today it was the memory of some oddments in the pantry that inspired this jaunt back to food from my youth, food that I had given no consideration except mild scorn and bemusement on the rare occasion when its name would arise in conversation.

Yet today it made perfect sense. I had the tuna and the noodles. A quick trip to the grocery store for milk, celery, peas, and mushrooms took care of the rest. Done with my work for the day, I stood and the kitchen and commenced meditation. Make no mistake, that is what this dish was all about. Cooking, centering, breathing. So simple, so clear, and so far away from the misery outside the walls that I ceased thinking about bad news.

It is important to note that this was mostly from scratch. I had no desire to shortcut the process by getting a box of pre-made "helper", or a tub of something from the local grocery. I wanted to build this thing, tweaking it to meet my needs and wants. Any grace to be gained would have been lost if all I did was rip open the box, pour it in a pan and set it in the oven. There would have been nothing learned. My mind would not have settled. My breathing would not have slowed. I made it the way it asked of me, and it was completely satisfying. This is all I ask of comfort food in the plague years.

Jesus Christ Movie Star (Sunday Meditation #35)

Is your faith not enough that it takes movies to make it real, or to banish doubts? Belief in heaven, of whatever stripe, seems to me to be the minimum requirement to make it real for the believer. I say this after having seen an ad and two film trailers this week for religious-themed movies, "Son of God", "Noah" and "Heaven Is For Real".

A big Hollywood production is a low benchmark of imprimatur, in my opinion, to make one feel better about choosing to believe. Faith is faith, and it doesn't need a camera or an audience for validation.

Sleet

Home notes, March 1st, 2014. 11:50 pm. Sleet falls amongst the snow.

Ticktickyticketyticktick

...is the sound of late night loneliness. Icy beads pecking on the panes, little metallic fingernails tapping the glass. Laying in bed with only sleet and house murmurs as companions. With no one around as distraction, a restless mind wonders if something is trying to enter, or beckoning it to come out and play.

The sound of sleet falling onto silence feels too loud to bear. Mournful bellow of a train, a mechanical buffalo separated from the herd, comes as relief.

Slowly sinking into the genteel coffin of the bed, listening to myself breathe. I'm hoping I do not become entombed in ice. Experience has taught me that this too shall pass. My heart remains hopeful. Experience has also taught me that the sounds of winter are to the soul what famine is to the belly: they engender gratitude for the feast.

Genius of Winter (Sunday Meditation #34)

Nothing is so sharp as the voice of love sliding its razor edge into the muscle of the heart. It can be confused with the crystal cold air sucked into lungs gasping in shock, stepping through the thermocline of the doorway into winter light like old lead. The walls do not keep out the voice. They cannot. The voice is love.

Acoustics are strange out there along the edge of winter and spring, between dark and light that speckles the caves of the heart. Echoes last long. One may come to believe that the voice has died out, faded away, is mute. Then it comes back loud and clear, in the guise of sleet stinging the face or cold biting the hands. The voice demands, and gets, your attention.

Distance seems not to matter. The laugh of a child can be heard in the skitter of snow dancing across the wind-scoured pavement. Confusing, yes, as the scene is otherwise dreary. But there is no denying the laughter. Sleet drips out of the nacreous cotton of the sky to freeze on the skin. The sharpness of pain brings focus, tripping a switch as doors open wide in the heart and head.

There are visions, brief, and luminescent like lightning striking on top of the head.

The faces of love, radiant and welcoming. Their voices ignoring time and distance to remind the heart of its home. To see in the swirl of the sky eyes that look like one's own is a miracle, plain and true, no matter how small it seems to the exterior world.

What matters is that those eyes can be seen. If they can be seen, they cannot be forgotten. There are unbreakable threads spun of blood and love stitched into the soul, yes, it is true. But one has to hold onto them, no matter that a gap of a thousand miles lies between ends in the physical world. 

Ice, snow, grey light all dull the senses. It is easy to slip into numbness, to suffer amnesia of the heart. A freezing breath lancing the lungs or numb fingers sticking to the door handle serve up reminders to be present in the world. To be present in love. This is the genius of winter.

Magpie Tales 208: Perchance to Sleep?

 

Poet's Sleep, 1989, by Chang Houg Ahn via Magpie Tales

Memories outside the window grow,
Pasts like poppies abloom in the garden
Little death of sleep, Hypnos whispers,
I love the sound of breaking glass

---

Italicized phrase belongs to Nick Lowe, from his song of the same name. Resistance was futile.

Hold the Sky

If I could have kissed the sky, I would have done it. There was a purple haze in the air, but Jimi Hendrix had nothing to do with my slack-jawed admiration. I looked at the sky, really looked at it for the first time in months. Rain was falling and to be honest I don't know if I fell in love again at that moment. Clouds like horses' manes, that curl of spray refracted against the sun when waves break on the shore.

That is perhaps what did me in. Staring through a plate glass window in the middle of the country, weary from a workday, and the ocean was breaking over my head. The pull of tides on the heart is a mysterious thing in the heartland when you don't have a liquid horizon as frame of reference. God knows I truly miss it sometimes. The steely bluish-purple sky, painted with curls of clouds that sang of the sea so vibrantly I forgot where I was.

Is it odd to fall in love with the sky? Perhaps this love is misguided. It is the sea that could be said to be my mistress, if I was so inclined to have one. Perhaps this explains my confusion and dislocation sometimes when I watch the sky or view the prairie. Alike in their vastness, different in their manifestations. Sky and grass have not the same gravitational effect on the salt in my blood.

I often ask myself if I should worry about tidal effects, how I feel the waves in my blood even being thousands of miles from the coast of my upbringing. In a curious inversion, the sky becomes that which holds me on the earth. The gauzy curls adorning the sky reminded me so much of the froth and spume on breakers that I was rendered speechless.

I'm rambling, aren't I? I should stop. Maybe. God, where am I now that I don't have the tide as anchor?

Don't be alarmed by my apparent drift. I'm not. I cannot be after the revelation I had when the sky caught up to me that day. File under "Things I Know About Myself": I can appreciate beauty without the imperative to possess that beauty. This is important.

What I know of the sky is that I do not want to possess it. To possess such a thing is to assume too much responsibility for that which I cannot control. What I know is this: I wish to  live under the sky, to coexist with it, and to bask in the glow of its beauty. I have no need to hold it anywhere but in my heart.

Area 51

Last week I stood on the rim of a desert mountain valley, tanning myself in the ultraviolet radiance of a salt lake pan, the existence of which I had allowed myself the luxury of forgetting. This forgetting is either conceit or folly, I know not which for certain. Perhaps the surprise its discovery creates is a product of willfulness, slag and dross generated by a desire to avoid the unknown irrational roots that anchor a soul to the world.

Queries will be met with neither-confirm-nor-deny. Yes, it is there, people know it by its present absence. This is how I myself know it. Explanation is futile. How does the heart describe the strange machines seen at distance, the enigmatic materials moving under darkness, dissections of mythical extraterrestrials? Who would believe it? Who wants to try, for fear of being branded a flake at best?

I cannot answer in confidence. I look at the dry lake in my heart and marvel at its strangeness. My mouth strains towards words to vocalize what my inward eyes are seeing. My hands trace glyphs in the air and I interrogate myself in my sleep. The dreams. I want to understand why I dream what I dream. There is this underlying belief that my dreams would make sense if only my heart had the vocabulary to parse them.

It does not. Not yet, or perhaps more accurately, my mind does not yet understand the language being spoken. So I wander. No, damn it, not I, it is my mind that wanders. The trail it breaks veers from pampas to forest to lush jungles, yet is always taken aback by the sudden bursting into the arid flatness of a lake gone dry so long ago that the vanishing is lost from memory.

Yet, it is there. It is in the diamond core of my heart, like the grain of sand in the center of a pearl. It is good fortune to laminate life with the bright and the shiny. Mirrors and polish presented to the world in the hope that there will be no misunderstanding or misinterpretation by the world around us. By world, read those we love and humanity in general.

But that is the ideal. Too many strange things happen in this heart-that-is-and-is-not. Phenomena occur that I cannot explain to myself, much less to those around me. It becomes a race between what my heart shows to the world and what the world, in its information vacuum, makes up about my heart. Whispers behind hands, looks of concern or affectionate bemusement, irritated impatience: these are the usual currency of emotional trade when discussing my own personal theater of classified operations.

So last week, I stood once again on the shore of that dry lake bed, the one in my heart, and baked in the sun. Black machines moved in the shimmer, far away across the plain. I wondered if there might be aliens here. I pondered the existence of emotional programs so secret that even my own mind would be at a loss to explain why they are or what they do. Officially, this place doesn't exist.

Unofficially, it does. It is vital to my existence, even if there is no way to describe why. I do not ask questions of it as much as in the past, and that is a good thing, I think. The heart has to learn to accept its own terrain even if that spot on the map is marked 'Unknown', and trust the things that spring from it.

Queasy Piñata

Today's attempt at writing has its roots in grandeur, and probably its end in mediocrity. My ambitions outstrip my ability, all because my head feels like a piñata. This is a source of great distress for me. I had grand plans and a good idea last night, but no time or energy to write it out. The backup plan was to write the kernel of the idea down in one of my handy-dandy little notebooks, then turn out the light for some sleep.

Except for one little detail. My bedside notebook had gone AWOL. Not in the drawer, not on the nightstand, not even on the floor beside the bed. I told myself that I would remember in the morning, but you can guess how well that turned out.

Upon awakening this morning I found myself in possession of a low-grade headache. It started in the base of my skull and wrapped itself around the left side of my brain, edging its way into the frontal lobe. Manageable in the morning, by late afternoon it would balloon into quite a whopper. Like someone was beating it with a stick.

A fine sandwich for lunch had no effect on it. Pain medicine? Pffft. My go-to solution of taking a nap was of no help. In fact, when I arose from the nap, my head felt even worse. The throbbing in the piñata bobbing around on the top of my neck made me slightly nauseated.

Nauseated, not nauseous. I use that word deliberately. 

Never let it be said that I cannot learn something new. As someone who aspires to be a writer, I am always on the lookout for new words and word-related knowledge. Recently, it became illuminated for me the difference between 'nauseated' and 'nauseous'. Shocking, I know, that I did not know the shading between those two siblings.

Simplifying a bit, but it turns out, that to be 'nauseated' means to be feeling sick to the stomach, i.e. inclined to vomit. 'Nauseous', on the other hand, means to cause feelings of nausea, i.e. something revolting or physically disturbing. 

A very fine line, would you say? Me, too. Admittedly the latest dictionaries seem to indicate that over time, the usage of 'nauseous' to mean the feeling of sickness rather than the cause of sickness has become so commonplace that the two words are near interchangeable. So for years, I had been saying "I feel nauseous" when what I really meant was "I feel nauseated". 

The realization made me nauseated. Heehee.

So when I sat down to write today, trying to think through the fog of fatigue, forgetfulness and headache, the only thing looping through this weird brain of mine was a riff on the new thing I learned. That is about as good as it was going to get, seeing as I lost another essay idea to the void.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, left me a little...nauseated. 

Letting Them Slip

Of the things that get my goat these days, the conflict between art and duty is at the top of the list. I kvetch often when I cannot seem to find, or to make, the time to attend to the acts of creation that I claim I need to sustain myself. It would seem to be inconsistent with my goals. It makes me wonder when I truly am going to pull a carpe diem and satisfy my intention.

My peace of mind depends on it, don't you think? And if peace of mind is that important it would seem imperative to follow those notions and impulses that feed it. I had the chance today. Make that two chances. I failed to act on both, and now I am disappointed.

The chances were nothing earth-shattering. There was no flash of insight leading to the cure for cancer or ending world poverty. No, these chances were more humble, intrinsic to me and me alone. Well, unless you consider that the chances had potential for me to gather something to share with the extrinsic world.

I had an assignment wherein I had the opportunity to do something constructive with my camera and earn payment from the results. The assignment was in a semi-rural area somewhat south of my current abode. When I had left the house earlier, on impulse I put my film camera in the car, in case I saw something scenic or interesting out in the rolling fields and farms. So it wasn't like I didn't have any equipment.

The assignment took longer than I expected, and I was tired, hungry and hot when I finished. My thoughts turned to getting home and finishing the task. I was in a hurry, for what in hindsight turned out to be not so pressing reasons. So I get in the car and head home, thinking too much about what I needed to do.

I passed a concrete plant at an intersection of two roads and what seemed like four cornfields. The interplay of light and shadow on the industrial structures was fascinating. I thought about the black and white film I had, but shook my head and muttered to myself "No time, gotta get home." I kept driving.

Nearby and across the road the top of a slightly derelict silo peeped up above a deep cornfield. Next to it were some barn buildings, also in need of sprucing up. Peeling paint, an old tree, cornstalks waving in the foreground. The light was hitting it all just right. The mood was of opportunities fading away, hard work needing to be done, and the unsettling openness of the prairie sky above it.

Perfect photo op, right? Great shots to be had, yes?

I watched it recede in my rear view mirror. I didn't stop. The velvet shackles of duty, the sure thing, the chore to be done, all convinced me to keep going by laying on the old saw of "There will be other opportunities, move along." What really bothered me, the farther down the road I went, is that the creative soul in me raised hardly a peep. It just let it happen.

The question turning over in my mind and heart while I sped down the highway back to the "city", was one of "If not now, when?"

Indeed. Opportunities may exist, but to assume a guarantee is to take them for granted. The voice in my head told me to drive, to follow the call of duty. My artistic life is in danger of atrophy, all because sometimes I listen to the wrong voice.

If Only I Could Stop...

If ever I would stop thinking about music and politics,
I would tell you that music is the expression of emotion
And that politics is merely the decoy of perception.*

Yeah, well there is the problem. I can't stop thinking about music and politics, even when I so desperately desire it. Part of that is just my own weirdness, part of it is the incessant yammering of pop culture and social media not giving it a rest. There is so much going on that I feel compelled to comment on, so many distractions, I cannot get it together. If I was paid for each reaction I have to the latest nuggets about gun control, Kanye West, Syria, or Miley Cyrus, I'd probably be wealthy enough to be "financially independent".

But I am not paid for my exertions. Thus, I am not wealthy in that regard.

I have been silent for weeks now because I am overwhelmed by the blathering that passes for discourse in our shared media environment. So many things I could comment on, but I do not have the time or energy. So I'll leave it to the pundits, talking heads and chattering masses. Politics lately is making me tired, and music, well, music is making me slightly sad.

Do-nothings and twerking are not the breakfast of champions. Right now, so much has been said by others I feel there is nothing I can add without shrieking or weeping. And no one, especially me, wants to see that debacle.

I believe this state of affairs exists because of the tensions that bind me. Politics I can ignore to no great harm to my psyche, but music means too much to just set it aside. Coupled with my obsessions about food, I am all set to be uneasy in the media environment these days.

So, I won't use this post to rant about music and politics. As to food, let me say that I have been thinking about it in the gaps where I was not thinking about music and politics. About what other people are eating, what I want to eat and where I can get it. This has given me the urge to write about food, which I must say I have been doing, just not here.

And that is a story for another time. I'll keep you posted on that score.

Suffice to say that all this mental meandering has left me in quite a state. Thinking about food often leads me to thinking about travel, because much of what I am curious to eat is better experienced in its native surroundings. Plus, there are people I want to meet in those places I want to eat. Here, there, and everywhere, food is often better when shared. My difficulty in traveling, meeting and eating is that difficulty common to the modern era: the lack of time and money.

So what is this all about? Ladies and gentlemen and those in between, I really do not know. This ramble of mine had no specific agenda, I simply felt the need to communicate to you where I my head and heart seem to be. Where they are, is somewhere between the poles and the equator, wishing I could break bread with you all.

That, and wishing I could stop thinking about music and politics.

---

*Lyrics quoted from "Music and Politics" by The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

In the Name of The Father? (Sunday Meditation #30)

I arrived home yesterday evening to be shocked by the sight at the end of my street. A ferocious thunderstorm felled an old tree in my neighbor's yard, two doors up the road. I say "in" the yard but it was really out of the yard and completely into the street. The tree was so tall it actually hit the adjacent house across the pavement. The sight made me blurt out "Wow!" with wide eyes. It really isn't something you see every day.

What it sparked me to thinking was about deep change, about how the confounding circus that is life can uproot your expectations and imaginings before you think to reach for the battens. This is how I felt about this Sunday, Father's Day in June 2013. The notion that I am a dad still knocks me flat now and then. Just like the fallen tree that now occupies a big chunk of my imagination.

I guess I cannot entirely escape that "Imawhat?" feeling, even now when my daughter is on her way to her ninth birthday. If we are trees, she is a sapling, I am mature growth, my own father old growth (and impressive).

A father? Me? It is a miracle and a puzzle. I often wonder what it is I did to deserve such a lovely, good child, and what I can impart to her that someday she will look back and say "He did have wisdom."

Mostly, I worry and pray that I will not totally screw up this fatherhood thing.

I keep that from her. She has no need to know how scared I am, how much I worry that I will fall from grace in her eyes. This seems to be part and parcel of the Fatherhood Gig, to my mind. A constant drumbeat in my heart and soul that is hammered out by this desire for my child to understand the good parts of me, and improve upon them in her own life. I think of her and the life before her, and the specter of failure on my part sends a bolus of ice water through my veins.

It is true, I am my own worst enemy and critic. I judge myself by standards I do not apply to others, because I know how unfair and unforgiving they can be. Thus I generate most of the pressure on myself to get this right, but it puts everything I think and do in a blinding, actinic light shining in my head. Nothing escapes scrutiny, nothing is to small to analyze...or criticize.

Harsh, but true. I am learning to overcome myself. This I believe is necessary if I wish to be the good father I want for her. Others have pointed this out to me, and I know they speak the truth.

Ah, enough self-mortification. It is Father's Day, after all. Looking past the commercialization and cheap sentiment that too often seems to cloy such occasions, I know there is something of note for us to acknowledge. The terrors and ecstasies of being a dad are things I would not willingly trade for anything on this mortal coil.

In the indigo haze of deep twilight, I look down the street at the fallen tree. All things must pass, I reckon, but the tree reminds me that we are all possessed of strengths we may not know we have. I think of my own father, who I am lucky enough to still have on this planet, and the things he taught me. His life was not perfect, we both know this, but through him I learned many things about being a man and father.

Seeing myself through my father's eyes, I know I am blessed by my daughter. She is student, she is teacher. I have much to give and to learn. It is to know and understand, on Father's Day.